The Midnight Oil

Hi friends,

Had a minute and thought I'd write. Days have a new rhythm now, since school is about to end and my commitments for this week included: going in on Monday for three hours. Oh, and I guess I had to do some emailing with students as well. Next week, commitments include Tuesday tidying-up day, Wednesday getting ready for the Somerfest (summer party), then the Somerfest. I think there's an assembly on Friday.

Rough life...

I'm using my vast amounts of free time to socialize, clean our place, panic about motherhood in six-seven weeks, get my computer working again, and write. I am working on a revision of my memoir, which is a story about Ben and me and our year-long travels that we took in 2004-2005. My plan was to finish the book and approach an agent about it before the kid arrived. My friend Simone read it recently and wrote me eight pages of comments that were extremely helpful and of course also a little depressing. I think every writer secretly wants to hear that the work is perfect as is, and of course, like a true friend and critic, Simone did not say that. Writing a memoir is intensely personal, too, and so when someone comments on it and makes suggestions about where it should go it's also hard not to do some serious soul-searching--in a sense, the feedback becomes about more than the work, it's also about YOU. So, anyway, I dealt with that in one afternoon of some crying and thinking, got back to work, wrote for about a week and really felt like I was making headway--then witnessed the crash of my hard drive and lost the whole thing (not the whole thing whole thing--just that week of work). Then I entered into a three-week long saga with Apple about the OS X disks I needed to get my computer up and running again (these could be found in a box in a storage space in Burlingame, California, or from the Apple store for a mere 900 kroner). Finally, after a lot of cajoling on my part, Apple sent me new disks and I am now able to work again. So, this was a set back. A stressful one. So it is really good that life has calmed down a bit, and I am trying to just chip away at the project an hour or two every day, revising, revising...in hopes that just maybe I will be happy with it by the time D Day arrives and life as I know it changes forever. Duh duh DUH!

I keep thinking of my friend Rose, whose baby was due the day she had to take her medical boards. Lola stayed in the womb until the day after. Good kid. I want one like that.

Kidding aside, I am very excited for the baby to arrive (not prematurely). S/he is growing by leaps and bounds. I know this because I have a foot lodged in my rib cage at all times and a head somewhere near my pelvis (I hope). The baby is definitely lying on my right side, so pronounced that my belly sticks out more on that side. Ben and I took a LaMaze class last weekend. It was really cool. The teacher, Judith, showed us all these posters of what happens in your body when you're pregnant. It's incredible--all your internal organs just move out of the way. Your stomach gets sort of tucked up near your chin; your intestine wraps around it. Then we learned how to breathe. The whole deal with LaMaze, and with another method of birthing advocated by this lady named Penny Simkin, who wrote The Birth Partner (Judith likes her, too) is that the dad/partner is essential to the whole thing. He/she counts and times the contractions, helps you remember your breathing, brings you water in between, etc. It's pretty cool. I have already warned Ben that at some point I might say something to the effect of "get your fucking hands off me, I'm in pain" and he has told me that anything I say in the labor room he will never hold against me. He was actually the one who brought this up, which I thought was a good sign. So.

Last night, I had Stine #1 and Kristin for dinner. We were supposed to have a kind of baby/birthing ceremony dinner with my friend Steph last night. Steph lives in Portland, Oregon and was coming for three weeks with her partner Peter. They are some of my oldest and dearest friends--they're more like my family than my friends, really. Anyway, they were supposed to arrive this week. But, and this is so tragic, a good friend of Steph's is dying of a rare and horrible form of uterine cancer, so they are in Seattle instead, saying goodbye and helping out. Lovely Stine suggested that we meet anyway, so in honor of Steph I made her and my kind of food: what I think of as gourmet hippy food. You see, typically in Norway a dinner party involves a lot of meat or fish, delicious, but heavy--and so I like to cook more West-coast style freshness when people come over. If I might say so myself, we had a really simple and delicious meal:

An onion tart
A quinoa salad
Fresh tomatoes with basil and olive oil.

The onion tart was a success, though up until the last minute I was afraid it wouldn't be. I can't claim much credit for the recipe; I found a rough sketch here, but I didn't have buckwheat flour so I used quinoa flour, and I didn't have parmesan so I left that out. I also didn't want to make mini tarts so I smushed all the dough into one big springform pan. For the topping, I caramelized the onions with some fresh rosemary (growing on our deck--thanks Benj), then folded them into the ricotta egg yolk mixture. Added a little cream, a squeeze of lemon. Baked about thirty minutes. Delicious. Like a savory cheesecake.

The quinoa salad was my old standby, also one I suppose I can't claim credit for since it started as a recipe in Vegetarian Planet, which is a great cookbook if anyone is interested. Quinoa, chopped arugula, chopped red onion, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, generous salt and pepper, feta cheese, and some toasted nuts (I used pine; walnuts are tasty too) at the end.

Lovely. It was a nice night. We talked a lot about having kids and being married and all sorts of other topics domestic and not. I really enjoyed myself.

So, not much else to write. Oslo is light until 11:30 p.m. or so these days. Not true midnight sun, but kind of midnight glow. And very hard to get to bed at a decent hour. Unfortunately it's been gray for a while now. Today it is downright raining, but most days it has been overcast at least. It's reminding me of the gloomy June of the Pacific Northwest. I'm ready for some hot and dry!

Hope this finds you all well.

Susie